As a huge fan of The Residents, Snakefinger, and the entire Ralph Records family I spent many years collecting until all that was left was unreleased demos and live bootlegs. The first time I heard this Live In Melbourne show I was blown away. His first two studio albums are great but have a very Residents feel to them (all co-written and produced by them) whereas this live recording showed me a crazy, revved up, “post punk” version I never knew about. I love both versions but this show is really something special and has been my go to Snakefinger recording for the last ten years or so. This recording has never been released except for some bootleg cassettes and downloads. I tried to find the best copies I could and finally sent two different sources to Carl Saff to restore and master it. This will be the first time the recording has been mastered and put on vinyl and Molly Harvey (singer / collaborator with The Residents through the 90’s and 2000’s) is working on a drawing of Snakefinger for the record jacket. Only 300 copies! Let’s make this happen!

Update:

The 4th side will be a silk screened design by Casey Howard who also designed the shirt. I got 4 different sources of the show including one from Renaldo (Renaldo & The Loaf) but ultimately the 1st one I had was the best. It has been patched back together and mastered for vinyl by Saff Mastering and is ready to go. I’m still waiting for some art work by Molly Harvey for the cover art. Once I get that I can put the gatefold jacket design together and send everything into the pressing place. Jello Biafra filled me in on some info about this live band. It turns out he introduced Snakefinger to ex-Dead Kennedys guitarist “6025” aka Carlos and he is playing on this album. Now I see why this album is so much more punk than the studio albums. I doubt there will be any copies available after these preorders so if you know anyone that wants one you should let them know that time is running out. I’m still hoping for a June release date.

In order to celebrate arriving at their tenth year, Jus Ed’s Underground Quality label picks up on Unity Kolabo, a vinyl series that has laid dormant for a while, and there is a suitably high profile cast of contributing talent. The presence of DJ Koze and Lawrence is likely to stop many a deep house appreciator in their tracks, and contributions from this European pair are complemented by some under the radar talent.

The Wall of Sound was an enormous public address system designed specifically for the Grateful Dead’s live performances by audio engineer Owsley “Bear” Stanley. Used in 1974, the Wall of Sound fulfilled the band’s desire for a distortion-free sound system that could also serve as its own monitoring system. The Wall of Sound was the largest concert sound system built at that time.[1] As Stanley described it,

“The Wall of Sound is the name some people gave to a super powerful, extremely accurate PA system that I designed and supervised the building of in 1973 for the Grateful Dead. It was a massive wall of speaker arrays set behind the musicians, which they themselves controlled without a front of house mixer. It did not need any delay towers to reach a distance of half a mile from the stage without degradation.”

i got to travel a lot in north africa in the last years thru touring with blitz the ambassador and the studio session with oddisee for sawtuha in tunisia. while being there i did some digging and found some incredible music from the 60s and 70s. some of the music in this mix has zero info on the net, was never sold on ebay and has not been “rediscovered” yet. others are somewhat classics in the field of „arabic groove“. the music in this mix comes from morocco, libya, eggpt, algeria, lebanon and syria.

Thru the “Sawtuha” project and Blitz The Ambassador playing quite some shows in Morocco I’ve had the pleasure to travel North Africa quite frequently lately and whenever possible I did some record shopping. This is a selection of some of the finds, music from the 60s and 70s from Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia. Some known some not yet.

This is also a kick off to a new loose series of mixes by us, people we work with or people we are just friends with. Enjoy.